Thumbnail: How to Get A Personal Brand Panel - A Conversation with Jason Barnard

Mike and Mary are joined by Jason Barnard of Kalicube to discuss the tactics a business owner or employee might take to obtain a Personal Brand Panel.

The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard) On Discussing SERPs, Its Entity Elements, and Knowledge Panels

[00:00:00] Mike Blumenthal: All right. So with that, we’re going to switch over to Jason Barnard who runs Kalicube, specialises in tools, and I believe, consulting around brand and personal Knowledge Graphs. And we wanted to bring them on to talk about the process involved in creating a personal or brand Knowledge Graph for businesses that don’t yet have them. Clearly, we’ve seen in local the importance of the Knowledge Graph growing dramatically since 2012, and it’s happening across virtually every aspect that Google’s bringing into the Knowledge Graph, whether it’s brands or individuals or events or products. Google is using it as a way to tell more in the SERPs rather than less. So, why don’t you let people know who you are, Jason.

[00:01:06] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. I’m Jason Barnard. I call myself The Brand SERP Guy because I started looking at Brand SERPs a few years ago, and I thought, oh, I’ll look at Brand SERPs for a couple of months, and then it will be over because I would have figured it all out. And five years later, I’m still delving into it and finding new things that I hadn’t expected. And I think one of the most interesting aspects of Brand SERPs, and for me, a Brand SERP is what appears when somebody searches your exact brand name, and for local business, that’s been important for years. You guys say, it’s your homepage that Google result. I say, it’s your business card from a less local perspective but phenomenally important.

[00:01:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And what’s been really interesting is the entity elements into that, including the Knowledge Panel on the right-hand side, the entity boxes and carousels and events. You just mentioned events. I think coming from a local perspective, what Google have done with Google My Business was get human curated data set of businesses where they created a Google My Businesses. Everyone came in and edited them. You had control over it. 

[00:02:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And with events that isn’t possible outside of Google My Business Panel, you actually have to feed the machine, and the machine needs to understand. And I think that’s where we’re now heading with pretty much all of these entities, be it people, companies, brands, events, software, whatever, or books or authors, whatever it might be. If it’s a thing that Google can understand, it’s letting go of the idea of human curated listings and Knowledge Graphs, like Google My Business, Google Maps, and moving towards a machine driven one.

Comparing Human Curated and Fully Automated Google Functions

[00:02:46] Mike Blumenthal: Just to note, Google Maps has not been human curated for 15 years. They only bring curation in under duress of a government investigation or a newspaper report. The rest of it’s totally algorithmic. And in fact, I know that you keep, you somehow think that the local business Knowledge Graph is different. It’s the same. It’s just we had it first is the only difference. So, it functions like every other Knowledge Graph in a largely autonomous way. And in many ways, it was where Google developed some of their understanding of how to store things in the Knowledge Graph, large-scale data sets, all that sort of stuff.

[00:03:24] Mike Blumenthal: So, it’s the same in the sense that it’s fully automated, but they do give people a little more chance to update it because it has to be current when you’re driving someplace. And if the hours are wrong or the place is incorrectly located, they do give humans an opportunity to let Google lower that. But whereas, if George Clooney is alive and it says he’s dead, or he’s dead, it says he’s alive, not too many people are going to be hurt by that. 

[00:03:53] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): No. Sure. A hundred percent. I think that Google My Business, you can actually change things, and it will appear immediately. The machine will override you because it thinks you’re wrong. Whereas, in the Google graph of the Knowledge Graph in the Google Knowledge Panels proper in inverted commas, the machine will simply correct you if it thinks you’re wrong even if a human being has updated it. So from my perspective, there is a difference in that you’re looking at.

[00:04:18] Mike Blumenthal: Yes, there’s a difference in how it’s curated but only because of the need in the local Knowledge Graph for more current information, not because there’s a functional difference in terms of how they’re created.

[00:04:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But there’s an example of baseball scores where obviously it’s not incredibly important, but people will stop using Google if the baseball score isn’t up to date. I use football because I’m in Europe, and we’re interested in European football, soccer. If Mohamed Salah has just scored a goal, I expect it’ll show in the Knowledge Panel, and that is time sensitive. They’re actually done a pretty good job of that. And I would imagine that’s where they’re going, is that the machine is going to be running it more and more, but that’s obviously predicting the future.

Citing an Article and Conference Event That Talks About the Future of Google 

[00:05:02] Mike Blumenthal: Yeah. Although speaking of predicting the future, for those of you who I think we mentioned this last week, but there is an article at Google researchers wrote called Rethinking Search: Making Experts out of Dilettantes, where they refer to the Knowledge Graph as dilettantes. In other words, it’s just snippets of information. Where they want to go is to be able to literally write a Wikipedia article in real time with images and references.

[00:05:27] Mike Blumenthal: So, at least that’s what the vision they articulate in this document. And that ties in with what they were talking about at Google I/O last week with MUM and LaMDa and images, all getting smarter, the ability to understand what’s in text, the ability to automatically write text, and the ability to understand what’s in images and display them based on queries. So, it relates to that in the sense that it’s not so much a prediction. It’s clearly where Google’s going.

The First Step to Having a Personal Knowledge Panel

[00:06:00] Mike Blumenthal: So, let’s talk about creating a brand graph though for let’s take a business that doesn’t have one or a person that doesn’t have one. Say, Mary Bowling wants a personal Knowledge Graph to show up for her name. What would be the step she takes to do that? 

[00:06:18] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The first step and I think people tend to skip it is to decide who you are, what you’re doing, where you live on the web. And it’s what I’m calling an Entity Home. You are calling it a canonical for an entity. That’s basically saying me, Mary, or this particular Mary Bowling, because there are many Mary Bowling’s and there was a certain ambiguity there. Google, you need to tell Google or convince Google that the specific place it needs to look to get the information from the horse’s mouth is a specific webpage on a specific site.

[00:06:51] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And once it’s done that, it can do what John Mueller’s calling reconciliation, which is bringing together the fragmented information it’s finding around the web and making sense of it into one kind of fact. And as you said, the idea that it understands enough facts to be able to start expressing itself in the form of a Knowledge Panel.

The Role of Wikidata and Other Curated Databases In Building a Knowledge Panel 

[00:07:10] Mike Blumenthal: So, what role does Wikidata play in that? Because that seemed critical. I just recently worked on getting my own panel, and I got one, but it seemed like Wikidata plays a significant role in letting Google know that I am an entity of some whatever. 

[00:07:29] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. Wikidata has a lot of power, I would argue. Wikipedia is interesting, but Wikidata is more important in the sense that it’s formatted in a way a machine can understand it better. There’s less of a notability need to get in there. You might not deserve a Wikipedia article, but you might deserve a Wikidata page, but it’s not actually strictly necessary. It depends on the entity type. It depends on what it is you do. For example, authors will typically have a Knowledge Panel without having a Wikidata page. Their Knowledge Panel will come from Google Books. 

[00:08:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Basically, my vision of this is that Google has multiple vertical Knowledge Graphs including the vertical that is Google Books and another one that’s Google Scholar and other is Google Images and other as Google My Business and the other is the Knowledge Graph proper, which is the one that I think they’re trying to fill up.

Google Using New Technology Like MUM to Manage Their Verticals and Knowledge Graph

[00:08:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And from that perspective, when you were talking about MUM, which is their new kind of technology, is one of the leaps forward they’ve made is that MUM is able to connect the image Knowledge Graph with the website, the webpage, the web index Knowledge Graph, and it hasn’t been able to actually connect these verticals before. And I think that’s something that’s going to be increasingly important is how Google is managing to correct the verticals and potentially move different verticals into the main Knowledge Graph. 

[00:08:52] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So from that perspective, interesting. If you’re an author, you can probably rely on Google Books. If you’re a scholar or you’ve published scholarly papers, you can probably rely on Google Scholars. If you’re not, then you would tend to look towards Wikidata. If you’re a film star or a music star, you can rely on things like IMDb, the cumulative information that these curated databases provide. IMDb, MusicBrainz, Discogs will tend to feed the Knowledge Graph quite effectively. So, Wikidata is ready to go. 

[00:09:26] Mike Blumenthal: To some extent, this comes down to Google’s trust in Books or trust in IMDb, correct? Or trust in Wikidata or trust in with Wikipedia? 

[00:09:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And Google Books is something it owns so obviously it’s easier for it to trust its own information when it’s time to be a third-party.

[00:09:42] Mike Blumenthal: So interestingly, sorry, go ahead, Mary.

What Are the Main Things That Small Local Businesses Need to Concentrate on in Order to Grow Their Knowledge Panel? 

[00:09:45] Mary Bowling: What do you see as the main things that small local businesses need to concentrate on in order to grow their Knowledge Panel? 

[00:09:56] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Right. What I’ve seen with Kalicube Pro, and I’ve been tracking 70,000 brands and people, and some of them are local companies, is that you now have a situation where you’ll have a Google My Business Panel and you will have a Knowledge Panel. And the two are living in, I was going to say harmony, but not necessarily in harmony. And sometimes you’ll get the Google My Business Panel above and then the links through to See Results About and click on it, and it shows you the Knowledge Panel. 

[00:10:24] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I think that, Mike, we’ve talked about it a few times, is that the two will merge at times. That if Google can be confident that it’s the same entity, it will tend to merge them. But I think this is all terribly, terribly new from a local business perspective. I would argue that although it’s not important today, that it’s a good idea to start thinking about how Google is going to pull these two Knowledge Graphs together or the multiple Knowledge Graphs, the multiple verticals together. Google My Business, in my opinion, will become part of the overall Knowledge Graph because Google can’t afford to not connect the verticals together. 

[00:11:03] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And just to be really clear, this isn’t something that’s going to happen in the very near future, but it’s something perhaps we might want to start thinking about. And it goes down to NAPs. I’ve always been terribly jealous, not always been terribly jealous. I’m now terribly jealous of the local search community because you’ve been doing NAPs for years. And a lot of what we’re trying to do at Kalicube Pro is doing NAPs on a fact basis with corroboration from multiple sources with the Entity Home so that the machine can go around. It can actually do the reconciliation that John is talking about.

Can You Merge a Personal Knowledge Panel and a Business Knowledge Panel? 

[00:11:36] Mike Blumenthal: So, I would make a couple points to your question, Mary. Firstly, there’s the whether the brand panel shows or whether the local panel shows for a business is largely dependent on the location of the searcher and how powerful the location panel is relative to that location of the searcher. And sometimes, the brand panel isn’t very strong. So for a business, a local business, it may not make sense to have a brand panel. But for a business that has a really prominent owner, it may make sense for the owner to have a Brand panel. 

[00:12:13] Mike Blumenthal: So that like in the case of Miriam’s article about the business owner in Lawrence, Kansas who speaks and writes, he’s done books, Danny Kane, I think is his name. He probably already has a brand or a personal panel. His business probably does too. And the two, it’s not clear to me that a personal and a local panel can ever merge. Can they or does it have to be a brand panel in the local for a merger?

[00:12:40] Mike Blumenthal: If you could merge them, then it would be a powerful, combined view. And we see that occasionally, like I saw it on a hospital chain I worked with where they had a Wikipedia article on the head, who was confused about where the brand panels should go. We finally got it to associate with their primary hospital listing, and that made the listing stronger. And it was much more information. It was very powerful. So, I think we can merge them in businesses. It’s not clear you can merge them, an individual and panel and a local businessman. 

[00:13:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Andrea Volpini from Wordlift has been doing that as well with the idea that you bring these things together, bring them to the Knowledge Panel and the Google My Business together so they merge. But with a person, it would be illogical because the Knowledge Panel contains one entity. The idea is that, from my perspective, is the Knowledge Panel represents the person represents the business, and the business is not the person. It’s two separate entities.

The Human Knowledge Panel Is Geo Sensitive; It Depends on Where You Search

[00:13:34] Mike Blumenthal: Right. Although you can, like I said, you can see brand and business stuff, which are, can be the same entity. And the other idea is that a bit of a human can’t be geo located where business can.

[00:13:45] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. One thing about the human Knowledge Panel which is interesting is it depends on where you search. Once again, it is geo sensitive because of the ambiguity of people’s names. For example, for my name, if you search Jason Barnard, everywhere in the world, I get the Knowledge Panel. But if you search for me in San Francisco, there is a university lecturer in San Francisco at the Golden Gate University. I then only get the See Results About because there is a more of a probability perhaps that they’re searching for the other Jason Barnard. And what you’ll see, I think it was Mary Moore I tried. If you search in Australia, there’s a judge. If you search in the UK, there’s an Irish actress. If you search in America, you get the American actresses. So, the geo location of the search will have an enormous effect on the people it will show you.

Creating an Entity Home, Being Clear About the Entities, and Applying Schema Markup 

[00:14:35] Mike Blumenthal: So, create a canonical page or what did you call the page?

[00:14:39] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Entity Home.

[00:14:40] Mike Blumenthal: Your home or your brand page, your Entity Home page for the business and or person or brand, possibly take it get listed in Wikidata. If you can’t, particularly if you can’t get a Wikipedia article, what else does one need to do to see a, let’s say Mary Bowling’s personal Knowledge Panel to show? 

[00:15:04] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): The first important thing is not to mix your entities on one page. Each entity has its own Entity Home. Google isn’t very good at having, for example, Mary Bowling and her company on the same page. You would have one for Mary Bowling and one for the company that you represent. And on that page, you need to be very clear about who you are, what you’re doing, who your audience is, and focus on what you do today at the top. Google will read from top to bottom and take it to be order of importance. 

[00:15:30] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And a lot of us start with the history of the company or my history. I left school at 18, whatever it might be. And in fact, it should be the other way around. It should be what I’m doing today, who I’m interesting for today. And then the boat might tell my backstory and same for the company. We want to talk about what’s relevant today because that’s what we want Google to show in the Knowledge Panel. Once you’ve done that, you would need to look into Schema Markup.

[00:15:54] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Schema Markup is seems maybe perhaps a little bit complicated, but I like to say it’s just you representing the information you’ve already presented in the page in a language that Google can natively digest. So, it’s basically taking that same information and providing it to Google in a machine readable format, which increases its confidence that it’s fully understood the text of what’s in the page. Then once you’ve done…

How to Get a Wikidata Page and What Happens to Your Knowledge Panel if It Is Deleted

[00:16:25] Mary Bowling: How hard is it for a local business to get a Wikidata page? What’s involved? 

[00:16:31] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): In fact, anybody can edit Wikidata. But if you edit it and you add yourself or somebody else for that matter, and a Wikidata editor finds that you are not notable enough, there are notability guidelines that you need to read, they’ll simply delete it. And one of the things that will happen is if you have triggered a Knowledge Panel using the Wikidata technique, and it is then deleted because you are not sufficiently notable in the Wikidata sense, the Knowledge Panel will almost certainly disappear.

The Concept of Notability in Getting a Wikidata/Wikipedia Page  

[00:17:03] Mary Bowling: What kind of things make us make a local business notable enough to get a Wikidata page?

[00:17:09] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Wikipedia talk a lot about having changed your industry. So, a local business would have to be fairly dominant or dominant within its local and local area for its specific service and have done something that is worthy of. What you would tend to judge it by is what kinds of authoritative trustworthy publications are talking about this entity that the local business and what are they saying about it. Are they talking about what it’s done that’s a little bit exceptional? You have to stand out from the crowd a little bit. So if you’re the local cheese shop who sells to the people around you, you would not be eligible.

The Idea of Piggybacking as Seen by Google in Relationships 

[00:17:49] Mike Blumenthal: But the owner might be. The owner might be still so they may be viewed as one way to approach it. Or is the owner speaking at national conferences? Is he writing books or manuals or consulting nationally? Those kinds of things.

[00:18:08] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And that brings us onto the idea of piggybacking. So, basically, if you have a company owner who is sufficiently notable, you can have that Wikidata page. And then, you can use the Entity Home to point to the fact that the founder or owner of this company is this person who has the Wikidata page, who has a Knowledge Panel. And basically what Google will then do is see that relationship as being close and strong and hopefully long-term, and you will piggyback, and it will pull you up into the Knowledge Graph on the basis of your relationship with that founder.

[00:18:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And if we look at families, for example, you will tend to find once you have one member of the family in the Knowledge Graph, the other members of the family will tend to follow if the articles and the information around them online that the machine finds show that relationship very clearly.

Looking at the Relationships That You Have With Entities That Google Has Already Understood For Google to Value You  

[00:18:57] Mike Blumenthal: So that’s an interesting thought, Mary. That a personal Knowledge Graph for Mike Blumenthal might help my Mike Blumenthal Consulting Business Listing by virtue of being a significant, adding value, prominence to my listing because of that relationship. 

[00:19:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): A hundred percent. And if you think about it in the way that we learn and remember as human beings, is that if you try to give me a piece of information where I’ve only got one reference to hook it onto in my memory, I will tend not to remember it. If you give me a piece of information and provide me with four or five different references that I already know and that already well anchored in my mind, I will tend to remember. And Google is the same. So if you try to hook yourself onto one individual entity, so you’re saying, okay, we’ll hook the business on to just Mike, if you have another partner, then potentially that would be a big help because Google will then have two hooks to pull it up by.

[00:19:59] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And the trick would be events are very, very powerful. If you’ve sponsored an event and that event is in the Knowledge Graph, the fact of sponsoring it gives you a very good relationship with it. If you spoken as a company, if you spoke to an event as a person, obviously that relationship is strong too. So you need to start looking at the relationships that you have with entities that Google has already understood.

What Are Some of the Ways to Represent Those Relationships? 

[00:20:20] Mike Blumenthal: And how do you present those? Like Wordlift I know has their own Knowledge Graph. Is that a way to represent those relationships? Or is there some other way to represent the relationships? 

[00:20:34] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, in fact, there are multiple ways. The first one is you need to write it on the Entity Home. If it’s important to you and important to Google and will help you, you need to express it as simply as possible on the Entity Home so that Google’s machine learning can understand what it is the relationship is. 

[00:20:52] Mike Blumenthal: So, the business Mike Blumenthal is owned by Mike Blumenthal, link to the About page. So somewhere on the homepage of Mike Blumenthal Consulting, there’s a reference to the fact that at a link to my canonical page with that relationship. 

[00:21:13] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And as you said, Mike Blumenthal is the founder of, and it’s a very simple, what we call a semantic triple, with the semantic triple incredibly simple. In fact, it’s subject-verb-object. And you want to keep them close together because the machine gets into trouble when you say Mike Blumenthal, the most beautiful human being in New York is the founder of the wonderful company that’s breaking ground call Mike Blumenthal.

[00:21:36] Mike Blumenthal: Even Google will know I was lying on that one.

[00:21:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, you need to keep them close together, and then you can use Schema Markup. You talk about Wordlift. You’ve also got Schema App and Yoast and other plugins that creates Schema. On Kalicube, we’ve got a tool that helps you to generate the Schema Markup so it becomes less geeky, less complicated for normally constituted human being.

Schema Markup in Expressing Relationships

[00:22:01] Mike Blumenthal: Two things, two questions I’m asking. One is I haven’t done the Schema yet. I still got the Knowledge Panel. So, clearly, it’s not absolutely needed to get it.

[00:22:10] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): No.

[00:22:11] Mike Blumenthal: But the question then is, let’s assume, what other things can you show in the Schema that would help this? Could you show the people list, the people you’re related to or other, what would you show in this Schema?

[00:22:25] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): A hundred percent. I think you’re making a really good point there because a lot of people, I tend to go Schema, and you’re right. You don’t need it. And a lot of people imagine that’s all I do is create Schema Markup and put it on pages. And it’s much, much, much more than that. Schema helps, but it isn’t necessary. And to come back to Schema and what you were asking is I can express in Schema who is my sister, who is my mother, who is my father. I can also express the company I’ve founded. I can express it as the company who founded the company. I can express where it was founded. I can express who the company or what events the company has sponsored. As a human being, I can express what books I have authored and so on and so forth. I can express a book has been authored by. And that’s one of the things with Schema Markup. You can always express the relationships you want to. So as you write, you say, relying on it a hundred percent is not going to work.

[00:23:21] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): And Andy Crestodina said something very interesting to me the other day. And he tends to focus on the digital footprint, and he just says, make a lot of noise, make a lot of consistent noise that is well consistent noise that is relevant to your topic and your geo location if you’re a local business. So, all of the efforts you can make, the echo offline and pull online or just online, are all great information for reassuring Google in its understanding of what you’ve presented on the Entity Home. But the focus is to say, I need to say, who I am, what I do, and who my audience is on my Entity Home so that Google has that basis of information straight from the horse’s mouth that it then goes around and corroborates with the noise on successfully making by sponsoring local events and writing books.

Controlling the Images Shown on Your Knowledge Panel

[00:24:13] Mike Blumenthal: So, we’ve created these relationships. That’s Wikidata homepage for the entity relationships with Schema. What else does somebody need to do then to likely get a Knowledge Graph or improve it? Like one of the things I’ve noticed in mine in my panel is the pictures they’ve chosen are not particularly good pictures.

[00:24:38] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Well, if you identify a picture you want it to use on your Entity Home, you’ve got a good chance it will use it if that picture is then used consistently across multiple other channels. So, you don’t need to use the same photo everywhere. But if it sees that photo only once on your Entity Home but doesn’t see it anywhere else, it will tend not to use it because it looks like it isn’t representative of you. So if you have a different photo on every single social channel and a different photo on every single newspaper article and then a different photo again on your Entity Home, you’re unlikely to have any control. I’ve personally been using the same photo across every single channel. And that is the photo that Google will show pretty much everytime.

[00:25:18] Mike Blumenthal: From 20 years ago.

[00:25:22] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): It’s actually from last year, but I do look very young. Thank you very much, Mike. I’m charmed. But that was an interesting experience because with the photo in particular, I had a photo and I decided to do the experiment of seeing if I can change it. And I got a new photo done, and I put it on my Entity Home, and then I changed every single profile with a new photo and a new description for that matter. And it took about a month for Google then to replace the old photo with a new photo in the Knowledge Panel.

Remember That the Knowledge Panel Takes Months to Update 

[00:25:52] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So, another important thing with the Knowledge Panel is to remember that we’re not talking days or weeks. We’re talking a month, two months, three months for the machine to catch up with us. And another interesting point on is I’ve been tracking Knowledge Graph updates, how volatile the Knowledge Graph is in terms of the information it returns for the entity it already knows. And it updates periodically much like the Google algorithm but not at the same time.

[00:26:20] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): So you got, there was a period from about September to January where it didn’t update at all. And until I figured out how to work out when the updates were, I was worried that all the work I was doing wasn’t having an effect because my Knowledge Panel wasn’t changing. And it turns out that Google was simply not updating. It updated in January, and my Knowledge Panel got a refresh look. 

[00:26:44] Mike Blumenthal: So, this updating occurs in your mind every six weeks, give or take, eight weeks or what are you looking at? 

[00:26:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. On Kalicube Pro, I’ve got a Knowledge Graph tracking tool where you can actually see when it’s updated. The last update was 22nd of May, which interestingly enough is the first time that the Knowledge Graph has updated at the same time as the main algorithm in the year and a half that I’ve been tracking it. Basically, you will have one or the other and never the two together until the 22nd of May.

Using Google Books as an Example of Things Being Recalibrated in the Knowledge Graph  

[00:27:12] Mike Blumenthal: Do things get recalibrated? Example, last week I had a numismatist, a famous coin dealer, who had written a number of books, and he noted that a number of people in his industry with the exception of the person who had a Wikipedia article, a number of people in his industry lost the consolidated graph of the person and the books and just the books we’re showing. And it happens roughly in that timeframe. And so I’m just curious, maybe everybody was suddenly perceived as less relevant or something or I have no idea why it would separate them once they’ve been joined. 

[00:27:50] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. My reading of that was that the books are related to the authors in Google Books, which is one of the verticals. And that relationship, assuming things are being ported or moved into the main Knowledge Graph, that relationship would not be as strong because obviously Google Books is dedicated to those relationships. Obviously, we don’t know. That’s me guessing at what might be happening. 

[00:28:14] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): But you pointed that out to me and I’ve actually got a couple of other examples of books being separated from the authors in the Knowledge Panel at around the same time. And I think we’ve got to appreciate the fact that just like the main algorithm, the Google Knowledge Graph algorithm is updating. And at times, it will shake things up so much that a lot of things will change through no fault on our own.

Knowledge Panels Are a Great Exercise for Better Understanding of What You’re Trying to Do and of Your Audience  

[00:28:37] Mike Blumenthal: So, any closing words for the audience here before we sign off.

[00:28:44] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Yeah. Knowledge Panel is a kind of, I’ve really enjoyed building Knowledge Panels and looking into all of this simply because I said as an attempt by ourselves to educate Google so Google better understands who we are, what we do, and who we serve, who our audience is. But I would argue that it’s a great exercise in the sense of that’s what we should already be doing on a wider scale both to Google and to our wider audience is focusing on our real audience, the audience for whom we’re going to be useful, but also communicating to them who we are and what we do and why we might be useful to them. So, I think Knowledge Panels as an exercise might be not necessarily great or important for your bottom line short-term, but it’s certainly a great exercise for better understanding what you’re trying to do and who you’re trying to serve.

How to Get in Touch With Jason Barnard (The Brand SERP Guy) 

[00:29:34] Mike Blumenthal: If somebody would like to get in touch with you with a question about a personal or brand Knowledge Panel, how would they do that? 

[00:29:41] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): I hang out on Twitter a lot. So, Twitter is a great place. If you search my name, Jason Barnard, you’ll see my site, my company site, kalicube.pro, and the Knowledge Panel, lots and lots of ways to interact with me there. 

[00:29:56] Mike Blumenthal: Sounds good. Well, with that, I wanted to thank you for joining this week in Local. We’ll be back with you next week. And we start the fourth year. So, congratulations to us.

[00:30:09] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Happy birthday.

[00:30:09] Mike Blumenthal: Yes. Happy birthday back to you. So, thanks again for joining us. We’ll see you next week for the last week of Local. 

[00:30:17] The Brand SERP Guy (Jason Barnard): Thanks a lot. Have fun. Bye bye.

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